France v Namibia:While strikingly similar in many other respects, in terms of their selection policies the two longest-serving head coaches at the World Cup are polar opposites. Whereas Eddie O'Sullivan retained all but one of the team that stuttered to a deeply unimpressive opening-day win, Bernard Laporte has made a dozen changes to the French team following their seismic and potentially catastrophic defeat to Argentina.
In fact, he had been expected to go one further. Of the three players retained, Cedric Heymans predictably returns from an ill-fitting fullback to his normal wing position, Pieter de Villiers is more surprisingly retained ahead of Nicolas Mas, and Damien Traille is retained at inside centre rather than Yannick Jauzion.
The latter is reputedly frustrated at playing outside centre and would have preferred switching to inside centre, not least to get his mitts on the ball occasionally in Laporte's straitjacket approach.
Instead, to his obvious frustration, he has been named on the bench in his home town on Sunday whereas the more prosaic, straight-running game of Traille has been retained, suggesting some of the same constraints will apply again.
"For a Toulouse-based player like myself it's going to be a special match played at our home ground," said Jauzion, before admitting, "I would love to play; it would help free myself up. We need to retain some anger, while clearing away any doubts. If those doubts are still lingering we will never be able to play our real game to the full. We really were not up to our proper level. There is no way it can happen twice."
Against that, in the absence of the injured David Skrela - which may be a blessing in disguise for France - Frederic Michalak returns to the starting line-up alongside his regular Toulouse halfback partner, Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, who has also been named captain, and with Michalak in the team, Les Bleus will be anything but predictable.
Why Elissalde was not brought on in tandem with Michalak against Argentina has been one of the criticisms aimed at Laporte following the opening-night defeat. It would have allowed Elissalde to take that 72nd-minute penalty to make it a two-point game which Michalak instead shanked.
Laporte has also been soundly criticised for the five-two split on his bench in the opening match, and then utilising only three of those five forwards in such an attritional game. He has reverted to a more conventional 4-3 split this time.
Other Toulouse players recalled are Clement Poitrenaud and Vincent Clerc, thereby reuniting their club's outside three, both flankers, Thierry Dusautoir and Yannick Nyanga, and loosehead Jean-Baptiste Poux.
"The Toulouse-based team members will be at home, their pride will come into play," said Laporte yesterday. "From the start we said we are a team of 30 and after a defeat we are not going to curl up into our shell. We're going to let the 30 play. With a group of 30 it would be unfair and illogical not to show confidence in people about whom we have been extolling the merits for the past two months."
The flip side of all this is that after six and eight years respectively at the wheel, at least one can say that O'Sullivan and everybody else, from the 30 squad players to the dogs in O'Connell Street, knows his starting XV, whereas Laporte patently still doesn't know his. Les Bleus' performance in Toulouse on Sunday will tell him and everybody else much.
FRANCE (v Namibia, Toulouse, Sunday): C Poitrenaud; V Clerc, D Marty, D Traille, C Heymans; F Michalak, J-B Elissalde; J-B Poux, D Szarzewski, P De Villiers; S Chabal, L Nallet; Y Nyanga, T Dusautoir, J Bonnaire, Replacements: R Ibanez, N Mas, F Pelous, I Harinordoquy, L Beauxis, Y Jauzion, A Rougerie.
